1. Field of the Disclosure
This invention relates, in general, to electronic commerce and, particularly, to global Business-to-Business trade in the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
At present there are three well-known forms of electronic trade:
1. Business-to-Individual. The Web site Amazon.com is a typical example of this trade form. In this form electronic shops sell consumer goods to individual buyers. In general this is a retail trade.
2. Individual-to-Individual. The well-known Web site e-bay.com is an example of this trade form. In this case individual sellers sell consumer goods to individual buyers. Generally this is also a retail trade.
3. Business-to-Business (B2B). There are a number of Web sites operating in this form, such as eceurope.com, esourses.co.uk, wand.com, tbc-world.com, globalsourse.com, perfect.com, freemarkets.com, metalsite.com, enron.com, busytrade.com, marginup.com, allactiontrade.com, b2bquote.com and others. In this form a company wholesales products and services to another company.
Characteristic features of all sites of B2B trade form are the availability of registration of a user of the site, the availability of an expanded catalogue of goods and services including different branches of industry and services, the availability of a seller section and a buyer section.
Disadvantages of existing B2B sites include:                Absence of databases with offers of sellers and buyers, where this information would be structured, that does not allow to carry out fast highly effective search of trading partners (Visual viewing of the available information is offered basically in existing sites that demands a lot of time);        The absence of information on prices of proposed goods and services;        The absence of information on the quality and technical characteristics of proposed goods and services;        The absence of a possibility of a various selecting of goods and services according to wishes of buyers or sellers;        The absence of possibility for announcing and holding tenders;        In general, the existing sites are informational sites, and therefore there are no options for contracts and transactions in the frame of these sites;        Most existing sites take no measures for restricting an access for unwanted users, who can impede the normal operation of the site; and        Limited multilingual support.        
At present, trade by goods and services between companies encounters problems, which especially concern companies producing means of production and offering Industrial and technological services. The above-mentioned Web sites try to solve problems of electronic B2B trade and offer expanded data catalogues. Existing B2B sites accept information from users about buying and selling goods or services, which is not structured in any way. That is, information about goods and services is delivered in trading sites by the user in arbitrary kind. Users at will give the full or short name of production, services, arbitrarily specify their quality indicators if consider it necessary, arbitrarily give the additional information about products and services, about the producer if consider it necessary etc. Such, not structured, information about goods and services is contained in databases of these sites. To organize fast and highly effective search of information about the needed goods and services in such databases is not possible. For this reason the search of the needed information in existing trade sites is extremely complicated and low effective. The user should look through visually available information for the purpose of search of the needed information in the majority of existing sites. Visual viewing of the available information on a site even within any one section (for example, “inorganic chemistry”) will demand very considerable time as the nomenclature of the goods in this section can have many thousands names. The impossibility of application of a fast and highly effective method of search of the needed information in databases of sites of B2B trade in the conditions of presence of not structured information in databases considerably constrains expansion of B2B trade in the conditions of the Internet. In the conditions of absence of the structured information about goods and services in databases of B2B sites is impossible to carry out required selecting from the list of the information, received by the user.
Further, available information in sites about goods and services is often incomplete. Typically, information about prices of goods or services, of delivery is missing on existing sites of electronic trade. Therefore, for example, a buyer must contact a number of producers in order to make an inquiry about the price and properties of goods. The absence of complete information about goods or services impedes searching of trade partners.
Thus, there exists a deficiency of information on possible partners, prices, requirements to goods and services, which makes it difficult, for example, for producers to perform an analysis of the efficiency of their business transactions, to make plans of production of goods and services, to carry out an analysis of their own prices and compare them with the prices of other producers. It is also difficult, for example, for buyers to compare prices of sellers, to make a comparison of quality performances of goods and services, and to make an analysis of the market. These current limitations impede the progress of the world market.
Another problem is a classification of branches of industry, and of other directions of activity, goods and services in the global system. This problem impedes a high-quality search for trade partners because there are potential sources of inaccuracies during forming of databases and during searching since the same goods can belong to different categories.
Another problem is the fact that existing sites of B2B electronic trade are not really global. They are regional or branch-wise in general.
Another problem is reliability, confidentiality and security of information allocated in Web sites, which on the alert keeps companies and, again, impedes business.
Additionally, there is a problem with reliability of a contract, concluded with trade partner, found with the help of B2B Web site. B2B Web sites do not help users to solve this problem. Generally, they provide information only. The specified problem also constrains development of trade operations in the conditions of the Internet.
Another problem concerns the absence of tenders in B2B sites. Since B2B sites limit their service by informational support, they do not offer a possibility for tenders.
Accordingly, systems and methods are required that decide these problems in the global wholesale trade.